The pile that never gets smaller
Post arrives, lands somewhere, and somewhere is everywhere. For a few euros and one anchor it becomes a place with an edge. Opening it is still your job.
Why post in particular is so hard
A pile of post has no edges. Some of it is on the sideboard, some on the kitchen table, three envelopes in a jacket pocket. You don't know how much there is, you don't know what it says, and that is exactly why you don't start. Mine grows until there is a letter with a deadline in it. Then the shame arrives on top, and that makes opening harder than it was before.
What a few euros buys you
Buy a tray
A flat plastic letter tray from a stationery shop, the kind that used to sit on every desk. It costs around three euros. All that matters is that it has a base and rims, because the rims are the actual trick.
Stick an anchor on it
DopaLoop prints you a QR code at 3 × 3 or 5 × 5 cm, or you write an NFC sticker. It goes on the rim of the tray. Tapping or scanning records the check-in without you going to look for the app.
A reminder every two or three days
Not daily. Post doesn't arrive daily, and a reminder that keeps firing into nothing is one you eventually swipe away without reading. The tiers run from gentle up to an alarm that focus mode doesn't swallow.
From now on, one movement
Letterbox, tray. That's it. You can manage that one move even on a day when nothing else happens, and afterwards the post is in one place instead of five.
Which stickers you need
NTAG213. It's the cheapest chip there is, and it's more than enough. It holds around 140 bytes, DopaLoop writes just under 80 of them. The newer 215 and 216 work too, they simply hold more and cost more. You don't need them for this.
The usual shape is a round sticker, 25 mm across, white or clear, self-adhesive. I got thirty of them on a roll for seven euros, which is a bit over twenty cents each. Small packs of ten sit closer to fifty. Treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a fixed price, sellers vary quite a bit.
A sticker needs no battery, no connection and no maintenance. The power comes out of your phone in the moment you hold it there. And it stays writable: DopaLoop deliberately doesn't lock it, because a locked sticker would be a one-way door on your own property. So you can point it at a different habit later, when your life changes.
What this can't do
It opens exactly zero letters. The voice check-in page says I don't know a shortcut for starting and wouldn't sell you one, and that still holds. What the tray changes is the shape of the task, not its weight. A pile without edges is unbounded, invisible and has no location. A tray with an anchor on it is bounded, visible, and has a spot where a check-in can happen at all. "All the post, at some point" becomes "this tray, today." That's a smaller hill. It is still a hill.
Why the anchor and not just the reminder
A post in r/ADHD about setting up systems and then losing interest in them has 1,430 upvotes. The top comment underneath reads: "If I have to remember it then the system fails." A reminder on its own asks for exactly that, remembering what it wanted from you. The anchor sits where the thing happens and asks its question at the moment you are standing there anyway.
Common questions
Tray first, anchor second
The tray comes from a stationery shop. The code I'll print for you.